About Books: The Nicholas Keating Novels

 

 

The Nicholas Keating novels began as one short story titled, “Coffee.” The idea came to me as I was walking through my town one December afternoon. It had snowed a few days earlier, something that rarely happens anymore in December. The snow had been plowed and the sidewalks were clear except for occasional black ice where the snow had melted on the lawns and flowed onto the pavement. I nearly slipped on one bit of it.

That reminded me of a pair of boots I had in the 1980s. They were fleece-lined boots with 2-inch stiletto heels. That height heel isn’t that bad on high heels, but in my opinion, has no place on a pair of boots. I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought them. Yes, I wanted a dressy pair of snow boots, but that’s kind of a crazy thing to want. Snow boots are meant to get through snow. Dressy boots are not.

As I walked home, I thought about a woman wearing boots like that and falling because of black ice. And an image popped into my mind of a young man for whom chivalry wasn’t dead, who helped her up and made sure she wasn’t injured.

Of course, in stories, help is never simply a random act with nothing more to it. My town has a coffee shop that is quite popular, so I made coffee a center point for a thank-you mini-date.

The story was not without it’s amusing bits. The young man, it turns out, is a violinist on loan from a Welsh orchestra. The woman’s second run-in with him shows him with his violin case, but his youthful appearance makes her think the 25-year-old musician is still in high school.

Throughout the twists and turns of the short story, the two, of course, are attracted and end up becoming an item despite the woman’s (Rachel) certainty that men leave and the fact that the young man (Nicholas) is only on loan for 6 months.

When the story ended, it was a case of me wanting more of my characters. These two had quickly become friends I wanted to know more about. So, the short story quickly became a trilogy of short stories.

That trilogy, alas, wasn’t enough, and I ended up writing a second trilogy of much longer short stories. While the first three were told from Rachel’s point of view, the second set were told from Nicholas’s.  Then there was a connecting short story between the two so I could make a novel out of it.

Once I was finished with writing and editing, I tried to get the book published without success. On recommendation, I had a professional editor work on it.

When a professional edits a novel, they don’t cut things out or change things around.  They redline things and make suggestions on changes. Some suggestions are general (e.g. there’s too much dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere. Try cutting some of it down) some are direct suggestions of how to change a sentence. Many of the suggestions were right on target. I cut out two or three chapters  that didn’t further the story. But there were others that were ridiculous. For example, they took the most poetic description in the entire novel and suggested I change it to something bland. My husband was incensed about that. He had read that paragraph, and thought the sentence was perfect. In fact, he jokingly said he’d divorce me if I changed it.

The “professional” also commented that the book was too long and needed to be shortened. There was no way I could adequately cut as much out as they suggested without destroying the integrity of the book.

When a book is edited this way, there is no requirement that the author follow every suggestion made. It is what the editor thinks will make the novel more likely to be published.

I went through each suggestion, following some, like cutting chapters, and ignoring others, such as cutting a fantastic description. But in my desire to follow the request that I shorten the novel, I came up with an idea that the editor hadn’t suggested: I cut the book in half and made two novels. The first novel was the first three short stories and the bridge story. It formed a natural break. Since the second trilogy was longer than the first, it ended up making a novel slightly longer than the first.

I still had no success attracting a publisher. The ones who take unsolicited manuscripts – ones submitted by an author rather than by an agent – take very few novels every year. They are usually publishers that are smaller, so they don’t have the budget of, say, Simon and Schuster.

I also tried finding an agent with no better success. So, having heard of Amazon’s publishing branch, I thought I’d try self-publishing. At that time, self-publishing was finally emerging from a taboo that would guarantee no “real” publisher would ever touch your work to being the preferred route to go to prove to a future publisher that you had a following that would guarantee future sales.

Having decided to take the plunge, I discovered Amazon publishing encompasses a wide range of choices. They have generic covers for use, although that can mean your novel’s cover may have been used by others. Or you can pay a fee to have one of their artists design a cover for your book. Another alternative is doing your own cover. They give you all of the measurements needed to do that yourself.

You get to choose what size your paperback will be from 5 or 6 sizes. Making your book an e-book – only available on Kindle, of course – is another choice. You can do paperback or Kindle or both, and they make it easy to do each one. (Recently they have launched hard-cover book publishing as well.) There is no charge for any of this, since you're putting everything together on Amazon yourself.

Amazon allows you to decide on your royalty amount for the sale of each book, either 35% or 70%. The percentage you want to make also determines the minimum price for your book.

There are many things you can do with Amazon, like having them do marketing, editing and so on, each with a price tag. I chose to simply publish on their site. My sales depend on word of mouth. My husband has been kind enough to design most of my book covers (and a few have been pictures I’ve taken that he’s then designed as covers with the title and author placed on them). It does save me several hundred dollars from letting Amazon do all of the work, but I also don’t get the exposure they might provide. Of course, exposure doesn’t guarantee sales.

All of the homework aside, once I had finished those two novels, I realized I still wasn’t finished with my characters. I wanted to know about Nicholas’s childhood in Wales. So I wrote another book. Then I wanted to know how things worked out with families on two sides of the Atlantic. So I wrote another novel. Then, after some sorrows I wanted to know what happened next, and I wanted to know more about their son as he grew up. So there was a fifth novel.

By that time, I felt that I had written as much as I could about these characters. I didn’t want to over-write them. I’ve read series where this has happened, and it’s disappointing to me. I think it’s important for an author to know when to say when.

There are authors who have 15-20 novels about the same characters without making their characters boring. Bernard Cornwell has written 22 novels in the Sharpe series, and 13 in the Last Kingdom series. Patrick Taylor’s Irish Country Doctor series stands at 16 novels and counting without becoming repetitious or boring. That, particularly, could have become very repetitious in less skilled hands.

So far, I have limited my series to five books. My Dark Faery series was originally supposed to be four books, and it came as a bit of a surprise a few years after those four were complete that I had an idea for a fifth book, based  on the main Vampyre of the novels. But nothing has convinced me to write anything about those characters since the fifth book was finished.

I have made a conscious effort to have limited sequels to any of my books. So far, by the time I’ve written four or five novels in a series, I’m ready to move on and find new characters to write about. I’d rather leave readers wanting more than have them – as I did with one author – toss the books aside saying, “Enough, already!”

I also like to write my novels in such a way that a reader can start with any of the books in a series and not feel lost. There are references to things that happened in other novels, but with enough background that they’re not frustrated by having started in the wrong place. I think of the stories as somewhat circular in nature, so that the final story often circles back to where the first one started, yet each one is complete.

This didn’t happen with the Nicholas Keating stories. The novels progress from when Nicholas is 25 to when he’s in his 50s. But even still, a reader can start at any one of the novels and not be lost.

The Nicholas Keating novels are my favorites of all of the novels I’ve written. They’ve become comfortable friends, and I know them the way most people know their closest friends. Of course, I know far more about them than I’d ever tell. They are friends, after all.

 

Mothers and Daughters

 

Mothers and daughters often have an odd relationship.

My mother was an identical twin. I never had any trouble telling them apart. There was something slightly different that I saw in their looks. And their personalities couldn’t have been more different.

My aunt was an extrovert. My mother was an introvert.

They were born in the 1920s, and typical of that era, were born at home, which makes the survival of both a bit amazing. They were the only twins in their grade, and possibly in the school, so everyone made a fuss.

Typical of the times, their mother dressed them alike throughout their childhood. Since they went to Catholic school, their uniforms were more of the same.

When they became teens, my mother was content to continue dressing alike. According to my mother, my aunt wanted to be more independent. She was a size smaller than my mother, so she frequently tried to find outfits in her size that weren’t available in my mother’s size.

I think of my mother as the dependent twin. Her mother didn’t help things. If one wasn’t invited somewhere, the other couldn’t go. Consequently, when she was invited to parties or other outings, my mother thought my aunt was the one people really wanted, and she was only invited so her sister could go.

Because they were always together she didn’t develop much independence.

When it came time for high school, my mother wanted to go to the Catholic high school. My aunt didn’t. But their parents couldn’t afford to send both to Catholic school, and their mother wouldn’t split them up (which would have been a good thing, especially for my mother’s development), so they both attended the public high school, which my mother didn’t particularly like.

My mother’s father was Catholic, but her mother wasn’t. Since the children were raised Catholic, and had been sent to Catholic elementary school, their mother felt she’d fulfilled her obligation.

As was usual at the time, my mother lived at home until she married. She got a job when she finished high school, and dated, like other girls.

One boy was interested in her that her mother wouldn’t allow her to date because he wasn’t Catholic. She told my mother life was difficult enough without having different religions in the family. She spoke from experience.

My mother dated a few different boys, but there was a war on – this was the 1940s – and many went off to the military.

She was thrilled when the cute, “older” boy from the next block down asked her out. He went into the military, too, but was discharged early due to a medical complication, and they were married in 1944, when she promptly left her job and handed her husband all of her money.

I balked when she told me that. When my husband and I married, we didn’t like the way each other did banking, so we kept separate bank accounts in separate banks. Her take on marriage and finance is not mine.

I was the only daughter and the youngest. A preemie born before the advent of the NICU, I wasn’t necessarily expected to live. I suppose tenacity kept me alive.

To say I have a temper is an understatement. I’m of Irish descent and an Aries, and descended from redheads on one side of the family, which gives some indication of just how much temper stereotyping and tradition say I have. I’ve been told The Taming of the Shrew could have been written about me (The main character is also named Catherine), except I’ve never succumbed to being tamed.

Actually, I think the zodiac descriptions are nonsense, and the Irish people I’ve met have been sweet-tempered and lovely, and my ginger relatives were always wonderful when I saw them. Still, I – although not remotely a redhead myself – seem to fit the trifecta stereotype.

It isn’t difficult to imagine the conflicts between my mother and me when I was often forbidden to do the things my brothers were allowed to do for no better reason than I was born female. In fact, most of our conflicts had to do with gender and gender roles.

My mother always strove to make me “ladylike”. My so-called friends in the neighborhood would pick fights with me, and say the most horrendous things to me. I would like to have hurled an expletive or two, given them a litany of their shortcomings, and had nothing more to do with them, preferring solitude to joyless friendships.

But no. According to my mother, I must never stoop to their level. I had to be kind because, how would I feel if someone said that to me?

Excuse me? Someone did!

Consequently, since this was drilled into me since I was a wee, small child, I have never been able to have a face-to-face spoken confrontation with anyone. I choke on the words. Everyone thinks I’m fine with everything, and they can say what they like with impunity.

I’ve long said that this inability of mine was the greatest disservice my mother ever did to me.

But oh, can I write letters that drip daggers and seethe with sarcasm. If you’ve injured me, quake if a letter arrives from me.

But most of these things were the occasional spats mothers and daughters have. My mother and I got along well. She would tell me stories of her childhood, and I would rail against the injustices done to her. I wouldn’t let someone do that to me or tell me I couldn’t go to college. I wouldn’t care if I didn’t have all the best things. And she would tell me things were different then.

Her parents were lucky they didn’t have me as a child. Anyone who knew how adamant I was, even at six, that they weren’t going to make me write with my right hand knows I would have been beaten to a bloody pulp by the 1930s nuns, and refused to submit.

Submit was never part of my vocabulary. Even my mother in the 1960s and ‘70s would often shake her head and say, “What are we going to do with you?” (My fear was that they'd return me to the orphanage. I always believed I was adopted because I didn't look like my brothers -- that is, I wasn't a boy. And I couldn't tap dance, so what good would I be there?  My only knowledge of orphanages was Shirley Temple films.)

One of the few things my mother and I had in common was that we were both born female. She didn’t mind it. I hated it. I always said she wanted a daughter, and she got me, instead.

Another thing we had in common was being introverts.

As a child, I was also shy, but somewhere in high school I think I mostly outgrew that – they’re not the same thing.

I still prefer the idea of a party to actually going to one, and I have to rehearse what I’m going to say when I have to make a telephone call to a stranger. I have to plan on what so say if someone else answers, tells me the person isn’t there, or if I have to leave a message on a machine. It's so much preparation! Texting is a godsend to introverts everywhere.

Dealing with people is exhausting, and I don’t know where my mother found the energy to not only deal with, but actually enjoy three children. She once told me she’d originally wanted five or six kids.

Of course, she couldn’t understand how I could dislike parties and meeting people, yet absolutely love getting up on stage to perform. I told her I only get stage fright at parties. On stage, you’re separated from people, and you know you’re doing the one thing those party  people are afraid to do. On stage, I’m in my element; at a party, especially where I don’t know many people, I have to pretend to be some character and play a part. (And being a writer, I have lots of characters to choose from.)

Attending an all-girls Catholic high school was probably the best academic decision she made for me. Because she was denied that choice, I was denied any other. But it allowed me to flourish scholastically. Socially,  not so much.

Girls were always difficult for me to understand. Growing up, I never knew when they were going to decide they didn’t like me for a day, a week or forever.

High school was a bit easier in that regard. I didn’t have people bullying me for being better at schoolwork than they were, as I had experienced in elementary school. We were separated into academic “tracks”, and I was mostly with the “smarter thans.” Being in the middle range of that group, there was nothing in that regard to bully me for.

I still didn’t have many friends. I always wanted to be popular, but in hindsight, having a lot of friends probably would have been exhausting. That was for the extroverts.

But how was I to ever date if I went to an all-girls school? Oh, yes, there were dances. But I lived a half hour from my school, and my parents wouldn’t let me have the car – although my brothers were allowed to take the car to any and sundry thing they needed to drive to. That was another bone of contention between my mother and me.

“Boys are supposed to drive.”

“But I don’t have a boyfriend because I can’t meet any boys because I can’t get to the dance because you won’t let me use the car.”

While this wasn’t entirely true, it was my argument.

I was in the church guitar group, and there were boys in it. The problem was, the boys I liked were dating other girls. Most of the rest were younger, weren’t interested, or weren’t old enough to drive.

Only through the magic of my mother setting things up with her friends who had sons, as well as a boy in the group who also didn’t have a date to the prom was I able to attend the junior and senior proms. In those days  one wasn’t even allowed to buy tickets to the prom without a date.

“You can’t because you’re (just) a girl,” has never been an acceptable reason for anything in my mind.

Anger combined with the “just a girl” restriction developed a very strong sense of independence in me.

I can’t? Hold my wine. I’ll show you!

I probably accomplished more because I was told I couldn’t than for any other reason.

I stood up to my parents when they threatened to take me out of said Catholic high school halfway through because my father lost his job. Always very private about finances, they wouldn’t go to either the parish priest or the principal of the school to plead hardship for a tuition reduction.

I told my parents that if they tried to pull me out of my school where I knew everyone to put me in a public school where I’d have to start all over again learning my way around, and have no friends halfway through high school, I’d go myself and tell the priest and the principal about the situation they were trying to keep private.

They were horrified, and threatened, but I was determined. In the end, no one was told. They left me in my school, and my mother got a job to pay my tuition. (At 16, no employers believed I actually was 16, so I couldn’t get a job. Otherwise, I would have paid my own tuition.)

It was surprising when, after graduating from university, she treated me like an adult, not like the child who had better be on her best behavior when we were out or just wait till you got home!

During a 10-year period when I was actually at an appropriate weight for my height, as a joke while looking for a bathing suit, I tried on a bikini and was surprised it fit. My mother was with me at the time, and actually encouraged me to buy it – I didn’t.

When one so-called boyfriend dumped me suddenly – the  vast majority of my friends were married with children by this time – and in frustration and not a few tears, I said, “Why can’t anyone ever love me," she actually cried.

The thing is, my mother was keen on my finding someone and getting married. I wasn’t. I simply didn’t like being dumped, especially with lame excuses or gas lighting.

My mother, the dependent twin, went from her father’s house to my father’s house, and never really learned how to be independent. I was born independent.

I went from my parents’ house to college, where I made my own decisions on a daily basis, back home until I could – sort of – afford an apartment alone.

When my father died, I had moved back home to go back to college for something I could get a job in. My mother transferred her dependence on me. She couldn’t make a major decision without consulting me. If one of my brothers visited, she consulted him instead. I found it quite frustrating that she was never her own advocate. I’ve always bristled somewhat to have to consult with someone on more than a superficial level about anything. I suppose that’s why, in 13 terms of college, I had 11 different roommates. And I even liked some of them.

Relations between my mother and me were generally good as long as there wasn’t a third party involved. Once the third person entered the picture, I felt like I was expected to dissolve, especially if said third person was male. I was, after all, only a girl.

Once I got married – at 39 – my mother was anxious for me to have children. Me, not so much.

I assumed it was probably a foregone conclusion that a first child – no, only child – at 40 wasn’t going to happen, and I proved correct in that.

I’m amused when people sigh and say how sorry they are that I didn’t have any children. I kind of laugh and tell them I’m cool with it. Besides, if God had intended me to have children, I would’ve been born male.

My mother, on the other hand, was decidedly not cool with it.

One day, we got into the whole baby discussion, and her desire for me to have a baby so she “could have grandchildren before I die.”

Don’t ever do that to me. I am not responsible for other people’s burdens.

I told her she had a granddaughter and two step-grandchildren. She somehow thought that didn’t count because they lived at least five hours away, and she never got to see them.

I am not without a sense of humor. I told her if she wanted to have grandchildren so badly, she should’ve had them first.

The whole grandparent thing is lost on me. My mother’s parents died well before I was born, so I never think of them as my grandparents. My father’s parents were it, and we saw them only a couple of times a year. They lived in the city, an hour away by the roads and speed limits of the time. They had so many grandchildren, I don’t think anyone was particularly special. I never had the impression my grandmother was particularly overjoyed to see us.  I didn't actually think she even liked me, although I think my grandfather thought I was okay. I didn’t know them well.

I have fond memories of my grandfather taking us for walks around their part of South Philadelphia.

The thing I remember most about my grandmother was that when I was a teen and into my twenties, every time she saw me she wanted to know if I had a boyfriend yet, and the answer was always no. I don’t remember her ever noticing me when I was a child.

She hadn’t wanted my parents to name me Catherine because none of the Catherines born into the family had ever married. My grandfather’s youngest sister was one, and she was a spinster.

My parents didn’t give any credence to such superstitions. And I, devil that I am, would tell my grandmother that I was simply following family traditions.

My mother was always my staunchest ally, although I didn’t always appreciate the fact. She would defend me against any outsider, even if privately she would tell me I was weird.

Still I think she did the best she could for me, and I did the best I could for her.